Grand opening! Backgammon Studio 3.1! :-)

[PillowFighter]

Hi!

More good news from Backgammon Studio! Some sweet improvements in this release!

Backgammon Studio 3.1

Improvements since 3.0:

• Play online matches! You can now challenge other players to an online match on Backgammon Studio!
  
  
  
  • Visit Showtime! section or use chat home menu to locate potential opponents.
    
  • Drag and drop checkers around the board or click on the checkers you want to move.
    
  • Click on the dices to swap the them.
    
  • Rightclick on the board to undo your move. Two rightclicks will also swap dices.
    
  • Once a match is complete both players receive the match in an email.
    
  • You will always resume a match against an opponent if you have an incomplete match with this opponent.
    
  • If you fail to play the best move you can check what the best move was by hovering over the move in the move list.
    
  • Errors and blunders will be marked in green/red. Currently you only see your own errors/blunders.
    
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  • Feature must be considered in beta testing until all bugs are identified and fixed. No serious bug is currently known.
    
• New actiontags:
  
  
  
  • Create homeboard gap or not.
    
  • Close homeboard gap or not.
    
  • Reduce homeboard blots or not.
    
  • Homeboard blotshift or not.
    
  • Break up 6p prime or not
    
  • Make a point or not
    
  • Create a blocking point or not
    
  • Reduce directshots or not
    
  • Front loading or not
    
  • Hit against stronger board or not
    
  • Homeboard point shifting or not
    
• New training tracks:
  
  
  
  • Midpoint crisis! The midpoint is such a nice point to have! Is this the time to give it up?
    
  • Bulletproof! Your opponent has a stronger board. Hit or just play it safe?
    
  • Greatest hit! You are in bearoff. Is it worth the risk of going for one last hit?
    
  • Anchorman! Hitting is often tempting but sometimes making an achor is the better choice. What to do?
    
• You can create your own custom tags in your private database. Mark positions with these custom tags and you can then search for these tags.
  
• You can set what move was played when importing xgp positions. This makes the position searchable.
  
• You can now search all positions in the database regardless if it was an error or not.
  
• There is now a light home screen option which hides away a lot of features.
  
• Backgammon Studio has now been localized to a few other languages. This work isn't complete and google translate was used...
  
• Cube hint at different scores.
  
• Average PR section now uses weighted average based on number of decisions in each match.
  
• Additional data in Average PR section. Wins, Cost.
  
• Improved about dialog with sections highlighting different features.
  
• Backgammon Studio notation! Intended for mobile phone notation of live matches. Fairly untested at the moment.
  
• A set of new textures for board and checkers.
  
• Duel/Match on a mobile phone is now possible with an option to show/hide chat.
  

Some images



Visit the Showtime! section or use chat home screen to view the users list and click on an opponent. This opens the duel dialog. Select match as type and set the match length you want. Click challenge and hope for the best! The bottom button will initially be 'Send friend request'. For friends you can activate a chat window from here. This saves you from going to the friends section and activate it from there.



The match progress is as you'd expect (I hope!) and once you've made your move you can check how you did by hovering over the move in the move list. I guess this may be limited to desktop for now. I'll fix an alternative option for devices.



On devices you can now also drag and drop checkers. I found it difficult to hit a checker to move it and this works much better.



On phone in duel/match you'll see a chat button which will expand the chat to full screen:



Chat away and lower the chat window once done. If the opponent sends you a chat message the chat button will highlight. I guess I can add a audio notification too.




Then playing a match on a phone you have two sections, one for the moves list and one for the action buttons.



I ran out of space for actiontags so I had to create a new section. Room for many more now!



Training tracks are fun! The latest additions brings the number of such tracks to 47!



In your private database you should now see two new menu options: Custom tags and Edit custom tags. Click on the edit custom tags:



and you can start entering your own tags. Once you have added a few you can go to the search section and you should see your own tags there:



One drawback with custom tags is that these are manually set tags (If it is generic you can ask me to add new automatically generated tags!):



Go to a position and click on the custom tag button in the tags tab:



Custom tags were created based on feedback from Nick Blasier.

In the seach section you will now see a 'Show all' button which will make Backgammon Studio search through all positions in the database:



But this is quite a lot of positions (Over 1.5 million of them!):



So one trick to avoid too much waiting is to build up your search when viewing errors and when you are happy with your search switch to searhcing all positions. This should be much faster.

This feature was suggested by Tore.

Backgammon Studio is large with a truckload features. This can be a bit overwhelming for new users so I have created a light home screen option:



After logging in you should see a 'Go light!' button at the top. Click this and the home screen changes:



which hides away most of the content and you're faced with just the basics. In the last quadrant you can scroll through the different other sections found on the server (most of them anyway) and there is an about button with info about each section.

This was based on feedback from Michy.

This also shows that you can switch the display language:



Bernhard Mayr asked about a way to get correct cube action at different scores and I had just added something similar for checker plays in version 3.0 so it was easy to expand it to include cube handling positions also:



I got a request from the Danish backgammon federation to do some adjustments to the average PR section. It is now based on a weighted average based on the number of decisions in each match. This didn't make a huge impact as far as I could tell. Perhaps just 0.1 PR up or down for each player.



There are also some additional data that can be optionally displayed.

The new about dialog which you get when you enter Backgammon Studio and when you click on the question mark after the title contains additional sections:



Click on the arrow buttons to check out other sections:





You can use your phone to do a match notation by entering moves. You may not always have video recording equipment available so this may be an alternative if you really want to get a match recorded. It hasn't been much tested though.



Feel that your board on Backgammon Studio is getting a bit old? Now you can freshen it up with new textures!



In other news

A fair amount of matches has been transcribed in the last few weeks and also a fantastic amount of matches from the Novi tournament has entered Backgammon Studio. Amazing work from the guys involved in that effort! This brings the total number of matches up to 4451!

http://www.backgammonstudio.com The swiss army knife of backgammon!

Best regards,
TP